Saudi Arabia wields enormous political and economic might because of their vast oil reserves. True, there are many other countries that produce oil, but no other country dominates like Saudi Arabia. Their geological advantage is not just quantity, but also quality -- they can pull it out of the ground a faction of the cost most countries incur.
Lately, with oil over $130, it seems America’s importance is shrinking as we wire much of our national income (700B/yr) to oil producing nations. All might flows from economic might, so there is a real reason for concern -- but there is no reason for despair. As John Pierpont Morgan use to say "Never Bet Against America".
The United States is the Saudi Arabia of Innovation.
We are good at taking risks, we are good at commercializing technology, we reward innovation and we admire creativity. Core to our culture is a bias towards action, that does not get bogged down in history or tradition. I am continually impressed by the caliber of my coworkers abroad, but autonomous risk taking is seldom their strongest suit.
America, by no means have a monopoly on innovation, but our “reserves” are awesome. Lets just say I have Techno-Optimism. In the coming months and years there will be great advances. I expect America (especially Wall Street and Silicon Valley especially) to play a critical role.
Solar – A Moore’s law of solar mean grid parity is just a matter of time.
Digital Power. – Electrical drive trains and sensors are displacing mechanical ones in factories, ships, hybrid cars.
Biotech/Genetics. – Biochemists are starting to hack genetic code.
Bio-Fuels – Algae, Bacteria, Modified weeds, etc. Expect crude oil to become an antique source of hydrocarbons.
Nanotech – From Super-Materials to Sensors, Microengineered materials will transform everything.
Internet – Data, Application and Communications will continue to evolve.
CleanTech – Transportation, Energy, Recycling, Water, Construction and Manufacturing will all be transformed.
Machine Learning and Computational Linguistics – Unlocking the semantic knowledge in text will have a bigger impact than the database.
And each of these technologies will support great companies. We should expect a….
Chevron of solar
Microsoft of genetics
Ford or digital power
Standard Oil of Bio-Fuels
Google of the Internet….(no wait, what I mean is expect more Goggles)
McDonalds of CleanTech
IBM of NLP
Who knows maybe the next Henry Ford is this guy.
